After (of course) developing 50% of my pretty large game, I've finally read something about tilemaps that worried me. I was using them to get tons of variation on almost every tile (ie platform floors with 3-4 variants, BG walls with 6-7 variants, windows that are 4-6 tiles wide/long, etc.), but I'm realizing for each next different tile it has to issue a whole new draw call. So a window in the background, even though its really only 4 tiles, it has to render 4 draw calls instead of having a single sprite of a window and only doing 1 draw call.

Now, my levels aren't HUGE, per se, but some of them have a lot of variations going on and nothing is really being "tiled". Is this something I should go back in and look at, or because it's pixel art it's not a huge deal? Or am I (once again) misunderstanding how the tilemaps are supposed to be used?

unless things have changed thendraw calls are per rectangle of repeated tiles

Therefore to optimise this, the Tilemap plugin searches the tilemap for areas of repeated tiles. It identifies the largest rectangles it can where the same tile is repeated, and remembers these. When it comes to be drawn, it draws the whole rectangles at a time rather than going tile-by-tile.

So I suppose if your windows and walls are not at least partially using adjacent repeating tiles then it may not be the best option.

My in work shmup game CYBERSTORM DEVLOG - "That Terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead"

Personally I would crack on with the game then if you start to hit GPU ceiling on your target devices maybe think about optimising these sort of things.

Thing is that unless you are wanting to deploy to old mobiles or trying to render crazy amounts of sprites then most GPUs are so powerful these days that, especially with browser based games using webgl, you are more likely to hit CPU ceiling first.

I'm no expert though.

My in work shmup game CYBERSTORM DEVLOG - "That Terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead"